Born on this Day 8th April
1889 Sir Adrian Bolt
1892 Mary Pickford
1912 Sonje Henie
1931 Dame Dorothy Tutin
1928 Eric Porter
1938 Kofi Annan
1941 Vivienne Westwood
1944 Hywell Bennett
1954 John Schneider
1963 Alec Stewart
1963 Julian Lennon
1968 Patricia Arquette
1968 Jenny Powell
1989 Alex Day

Died on this Day
1614 El Greco
1973 Pablo Picasso

Music
1955 Eartha Kitt and Dean Martin both reached the Top 20 with the same song, ‘Under The Bridges of Paris’.

1967 Sandie Shaw won the UK heat of Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Puppet On a String’.

1978 Wings’ ‘With A Little Luck’ entered the US top 40.

1988 REM left Records to join Warner Brothers.

1989 Lol Tolhurst, drummer with The Cure, left the group.

1993 Paul McCartney announced plans for his Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts which was to open in 1995. He hoped that students would be taught by performers such as Ringo Starr and George Harrison.

Sport
1882 Warwickshire County Cricket Club was founded at a meeting at the Queen’s hotel in Coventry.

1992 Former US tennis star and Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe announced that he was HIV positive. He had contracted the disease from a blood transfusion during a heart operation.

People & Showbiz
1983 Prince Charles lost his composure and swore after a gust of wind blew away his script, moments before he was due to deliver a speech on the use of bad language in front of 13,500 schoolchildren in a small Western Australian town.

General Events
1966 Figures in the UK showed that the number of illegitimate births had nearly doubled during the past 10 years.

1983 The leading oil companies announced petrol price increases of between 9 and 14 pence, the largest increases in the history of motoring.

1983 The rain finally came to an end as the deep south in the US suffered its worst floods in two decades, forcing 25,000 people from their homes, leaving 1 million isolated and 7 dead.

1984 Mark Aitken, a zoo keeper at Port Lympne zoo in Kent, was accidentally crushed to death by a bull elephant which crushed his head against railings.

1989 The five crew of the space shuttle Challenger were to make another attempt at retrieving the malfunctioned satellite Solar Max. The earlier attempt ended in failure.

1989 British Rail announced they were to install close-circuit television and extra lighting at stations to combat drunken hooligans on late- night trains.

1992 It was reported that 45,000 people had visited a church in Stockholm during the past 3 weeks to be blessed by a 16 yr old girl who claimed to have seen visions of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the Lebanese saint, Mar Charbel.

1995 It was reported that eight prisoners enjoyed a £20,000 adventure holiday in the Brecon Beacons, South Wales. The eight were serving sentences at Brixton prison in London for crimes of violence, burglary and fraud.